Online services exist for consuming digital media content. Digital media content includes movies, television, music, books, magazines, photos, graphics, and other digital media content. Consumption of digital media content by an online visitor to these services can take a variety of forms, possibly depending on the type of digital media content and other factors. Some possible consumption forms include downloading, streaming, viewing, reading, listening to, or otherwise consuming the content.
Some of the online services are subscription-based, requiring visitors to periodically pay a subscription fee to consume digital media content from the service. For example, an online video streaming service may charge visitors a monthly subscription fee to stream digital video from the service. Other services charge a per-transaction fee to consume digital media content. For example, an online music store may charge a fee for each digital song purchased from the online store. Other payment and subscription models are possible.
An online service may offer a wide selection of consumable digital media content from which an online visitor to the service can choose from. Further, the service may frequently update the content available from the service with new content. As a result, the online visitor may visit the service with a general intent to consume digital content but without any specific digital media content in mind.
To help the online visitor choose specific digital media content to consume, the service may implement a recommendation algorithm that attempts to predict which of the available digital media content the online visitor might like to consume. Such predication may be based, for example, on digital media content the online visitor previously consumed from the service. The service may present recommended digital media content to the online visitor, for example, on a web page. Ideally, the recommendation algorithm will recommend digital media content the online visitor wants to consume.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.